Chapter 8 - The Weight of Twenty-Six Years
The deafening crash of the four-ton steel crane beam shook the concrete slab of the lumber shed like an earthquake, throwing up a suffocating black wall of burning sawdust and splintered pine timber between us and Victor Vance's men.
Behind the heavy iron counterweight of the industrial forklift, I dropped to my knees on the oil-stained concrete as Mark collapsed backward against my chest, his grey wool sweater instantly soaking through with hot, dark blood right below his collarbone.
"Mark, no, stay with me, look at me!" I cried, tearing off my silk scarf with trembling hands and pressing it with all my weight against the two bullet wounds in his chest while gunfire and angry shouts echoed from the other side of the collapsed beam.
Thirty feet to our left in the swirling smoke, Luke moved like a lethal wraith through the darkness, tackling one of Vance's disoriented riflemen who had stumbled around the flaming timber, stripping the man's automatic carbine from his hands in three brutal seconds, and laying down a blistering burst of suppressive fire that drove Vance and Denise back behind the office concrete block wall.
Down behind the forklift, Mark's pale hand rose weakly despite the plastic zip-ties binding his wrists, his bloodstained fingers finding my left hand and brushing against the bare skin where my wedding ring used to sit before touching the gold band on my right ring finger.
"You kept it," Mark whispered, a faint, broken smile touching his pale lips as a trickle of blood ran down his chin and his eyes held mine without looking away for a single second.
"I wanted to tell you every single day for three years, Claire, especially when Michael told me you had surgery and went home from the hospital all by yourself," he gasped, each breath rattling painfully in his lungs.
Tears blinded my eyes as I pressed harder on the wound, begging him not to talk and swearing that Luke was going to get us out to a hospital right now.
"Listen to me, sweetheart, in the left pocket of my trousers is a brass locker key for Locker Three-Twelve at the Main Street Bus Terminal downtown," Mark forced out, his fingers clamping onto my wrist with the last of his strength.
"Denise thought she was watching me every minute in Chicago, but whenever she was asleep, I copied the master cryptographic keys and offshore routing ledgers for every politician and judge on Vane Development's payroll onto a hard drive and mailed it to that locker last week when I found out we were coming to Richmond," he told me before his eyelids fluttered shut and his head slumped limply against my shoulder.
"He still has a carotid pulse, Claire, help me lift him now!" Luke shouted, appearing out of the smoke with my father and a terrified, weeping Michael right behind him after slicing Mark's wrist ties off with a pocket knife.
Together, Luke and Michael hoisted Mark's unconscious body through the rusted rear fire door into the pouring rain, loading him across the middle row of Victor Vance's own armored Cadillac Escalade parked beside the loading dock while I climbed in beside Mark to keep pressure on his chest.
Luke shot the tires out on the remaining two vehicles in the lot, vaulted into the driver's seat of the Escalade, and floored the six-liter engine out of the dock gates onto the slick riverfront avenue while Denise and Vance's surviving gunmen ran out into the rain firing futilely after our bulletproof rear glass.
As we raced toward St. Mary's Hospital with my hands covered in my husband's blood and my father praying aloud in the backseat beside Michael, I saw the flashing red-and-blue light bars of three Henrico County sheriff's cruisers swing across the four-lane avenue half a mile ahead of us at the bridge intersection.
"Thank God, the police heard the explosion at the dock!" Michael gasped in relief from the back row, leaning forward between the seats.
Luke did not slow the armored Escalade down; instead, his blue eyes narrowed as he looked through the rain-swept windshield at the lead patrol cruiser blocking the center lane—where a tall, heavyset officer in a sheriff's raincoat stepped out behind his open door leveling a combat shotgun straight at our windshield instead of waving us through.
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"That isn't a rescue patrol, Luke, don't stop the car!" my father screamed from the backseat as the porch lights of the intersection illuminated the gold badge and the familiar, crooked nose of the officer aiming the shotgun at us.
Standing at the center of the police blockade with two of Vane Development's black SUVs pulling up right behind his cruisers to box us in was Chief Deputy Arthur Miller—my father's own younger brother's son, my first cousin, and the high-ranking county lawman who had personally signed the falsified quarry accident report on the afternoon my mother was murdered.
